Since SAP's announcement of its single tier Enterprise Support plan last July,
customers have continued to express dissatisfaction. In response to
such complaints, the SAP User Group Executive Network (SUGEN) of 12 SAP
user groups and SAP have been engaging in discussions around the value
derived from this new offering. This morning SAP and SUGEN announced
an agreement on three key areas of the Enterprise Support offering:

Oracle announces a $7.4B deal for SUN just a few weeks after the IBM
deal fell through. Oracle now controls a significant major open source
alternative and a nice piece of the high end computing business. These
open source components have been viewed as the alternative to the
dominance of the Big 4 or MISO (Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle).
Oracle also gains an innovation engine with the assets of Sun's Labs
groups which pioneers a series of innovations that include potential
enterprise solutions for the virtual world. The deal puts Oracle on a
continued path to acquiring deeper components of the enterprise
computing stack. Here's how the stack looks:

Categories:

Last fall, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced that his company was getting into the hardware business, but I think he misspoke. At that time, he was referring to the new HP Oracle Database Machine with Exadata Storage, a high-end data warehousing (DW) appliance that incorporated hardware from his partner, as well as intelligent storage software technology from that partner--and even had the partner’s name first in the product name. If that was the criterion for “getting into the hardware business”--i.e., running on someone else’s hardware--then every software vendor on earth is in the hardware business, by my reckoning.

In this podcast, Matt discusses five key trends that Forrester believes will have a significant impact on information management in 2009, including the rise of cloud computing services, and what’s going to happen to social software and Web 2.0 this year.